Thomas Jefferson offers numerous opportunities for pro-gun advocates. “Historical research demonstrates the Founders out-‘NRAing’ even the NRA,” proclaimed one prolific scholar. “‘One loves to possess arms’ wrote Thomas Jefferson, the premier intellectual of his day, to George Washington on June 19, 1796.” What a find! Oops: Jefferson was not talking about guns. He was writing to Washington asking for copies of some old letters, to have handy so he could issue a rebuttal in case he got attacked for a decision he made as secretary of state. The NRA website still includes the quote. You can go online to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with Jefferson’s mangled words.

Some of the assumptions were simply funny. In his book on judicial philosophy, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, lauded Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm’s “excellent study” of English gun rights, noting sarcastically, “she is not a member of the Michigan Militia, but an Englishwoman.” But a historian fact-checked the justice: “Malcolm’s name may sound British, and Bentley College, where Malcolm teaches history, may sound like a college at Oxford, but in fact Malcolm was born and raised in Utica, New York, and Bentley is a business college in Massachusetts.”

Still, all this focus on historical research began to have an impact. And eventually these law professors, many toiling at the fringes of respectability, were joined by a few of academia’s leading lights. Sanford Levinson is a prominent liberal constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In 1989, he published an article tweaking other progressives for ignoring “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” “For too long,” he wrote, “most members of the legal academy have treated the Second Amendment as the equivalent of an embarrassing relative, whose mention brings a quick change of subject to other, more respectable, family members. That will no longer do.” Levinson was soon joined by Akhil Reed Amar of Yale and Harvard’s Laurence Tribe. These prominent progressives had differing opinions on the amendment and its scope. But what mattered was their political provenance—they were liberals! (One is reminded of Robert Frost’s definition of a liberal: someone so open-minded he will not take his own side in an argument.)

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As the revisionist perspective took hold, government agencies also began to shift. In 1981, Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in 24 years. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch became chair of a key Judiciary Committee panel, where he commissioned a study on “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms.” In a breathless tone it announced, “What the Subcommittee on the Constitution uncovered was clear—and long lost—proof that the second amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.” The cryptologist discovering invisible writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence in the Disney movie National Treasure could not have said it better.

Despite Hatch’s dramatic “discovery,” a constitutional right to gun ownership was still a stretch, even for the conservatives in Reagan’s Justice Department, who were reluctant to undo the work not only of judges, but also of democratically elected legislators. When Ed Meese, Reagan’s attorney general, commissioned a comprehensive strategy for jurisprudential change in 15 areas ranging from the “exclusionary rule” under the Fourth Amendment to public initiatives to private religious education, it did not include a plan for the Second Amendment.

But in time, the NRA’s power to elect presidents began to shift executive branch policies, too. In 2000, gun activists strongly backed Governor George W. Bush of Texas. After the election, Bush’s new attorney general, John Ashcroft, reversed the Justice Department’s stance. The NRA’s head lobbyist read the new policy aloud at its 2001 convention in Kansas City: “The text and original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms.”

In the meantime, the “individual right” argument was starting to win in another forum: public opinion. In 1959, according to a Gallup poll, 60 percent of Americans favored banning handguns; that dropped to 41 percent by 1975 and 24 percent in 2012. By early 2008, according to Gallup, 73 percent of Americans believed the Second Amendment “guaranteed the rights of Americans to own guns” outside the militia.

Over the past decade, the idea of a Second Amendment right has become synonymous with conservatism, even with support for the Republican Party. In 1993, for example, the New York Times mentioned “gun control” 388 times, and the Second Amendment only 16. By 2008, overall mentions of the issue dropped to 160 but the Second Amendment was mentioned 59 times.

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In the end, it was neither the NRA nor the Bush administration that pressed the Supreme Court to reverse its centuries-old approach, but a small group of libertarian lawyers who believed other gun advocates were too timid. They targeted a gun law passed by the local government in Washington, D.C., in 1976—perhaps the nation’s strictest—that barred individuals from keeping a loaded handgun at home without a trigger lock. They recruited an appealing plaintiff: Dick Heller, a security guard at the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, who wanted to bring his work revolver home to his high-crime neighborhood. The NRA worried it lacked the five votes necessary to win. The organization tried to sideswipe the effort, filing what Heller’s lawyers called “sham litigation” to give courts an excuse to avoid a constitutional ruling. But the momentum that the NRA itself had set in motion proved unstoppable, and the big case made its way to the Supreme Court.